I just finished researching innovation trends in retail. It took over a year to complete and honestly, the insights shared in it are applicable to every industry. Please download, read and share it with your colleagues, even if you’re not in retail. It’ll help. Recently, I was invited to present my findings on retail innovation at The Summit hosted by AT&T. I also cut right to the heart of the matter, that what we’re really talking about is change. How…
How true storytelling can save marketing (and more…)
I recently had the privilege to work on a very special project with my friends at GapingVoid and LinkedIn. We set out on a creative endeavor to explore the intersection of story, art, humor and candor as a means of fostering self-reflection and inspiring personal and professional change. The result is a something I’m very proud of…a new short and sweet but compelling ebook, Once Upon a Digital Time: How to be an amazing storyteller when everyone is a “storyteller.”…
Customer Experience, Where It is Now, and Where It Will Go Next
Leo Bertelli was gracious enough to invite me for an interview on the state and future of CX. The conversation was so engrossing that I wanted to share it with you here. I hope it helps you! What do you think have been the most significant advances in CX in previous years? You can’t talk about customer experience if you don’t appreciate what the word experience means – and as the author of a book on experience design, I struggled…
The Future of Brand is Experienced and Shared
That one time I was in Genève… What a wonderful way to start any sentence. Shortly after X: The Experience When Business Meets Design launched, I was invited by my good friend Arnaud Grobet to visit Genève. The trip was meant to serve as a mini book tour, with two speaking engagements at LIFT (one of my favorite events), media interviews and also a vist to CREA University to speak to students. Any time I have a chance to speak with…
The Importance of Experience Design and the Future of Brand
Customers today are accidental narcissists. Tomorrow is an entirely new game brands, CX strategists and marketers. Disruption is a gift either given to you or by you. Knowing this, we are still making mistakes in creating meanignful experiences to a new generation of connected, impatient and demanding customers. We get stuck in legacy thinking, playbooks and metrics rather than innovate and disrupt to fully capitalize on new digital opportunities. Following my presentation at Adobe Summit, I had the opportunity to…
Great Customer Experiences an Upgrade to Executive and Management Mindsets
It’s a new year and not necessarily another step forward. This isn’t the first time I’ve used this profound picture by Banksy as inspired by Meek. It always inspires me to spread my wings as a change agent. In my research, I find time and time again that digital transformation and corporate innovation is spurred by customer experience. The reality is that customers, as a result of their relationship with technology and the resulting digital transformation of their personal and professional…
Is technology creating a narcissistic society?
Part 2 in a media tour series for my 2016 keynote at Digital Business World Congress (DES) in Madrid, Spain. This interview is with Expansión, “La tecnología está creando una sociedad narcisista.” Technology is creating a narcissistic society We all talk a lot about change, but how can we change ourselves? This question refers to a famous quote by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, “We all talk of change but we don’t talk of changing ourselves.” To change ourselves requires us to first…
The Future of Experience Design
It’s amazing to me how many companies still don’t “see” the customer when it comes to customer experience. While everyone talks about Customer Experience (CX) as the new black, most companies miss the real opportunity to be customer-centric. They don’t actually think about experiences from the perspective of the people they want to reach. Customers are evolving. Business processes and mindsets are not keeping up. As a result, they’re limited in the ability to design experiences that matter to an…
Breaking the Digital Fourth Wall Through Experiential Storytelling
The fourth wall is the space that separates a performer or performance from an audience. A character, actor, author or storyteller “breaks the fourth wall” when they address the audience directly. As an analyst, author, blogger, podcaster and creator, I am by default, in the content business. Dedicating time to produce my work matters not if no one happens upon it. But once someone discovers my work, it must convincingly pierce the fourth wall between the medium and them to…
It’s not the End of Retail, It’s the End of Retail As We Know It
Retail, like every industry, faces digital Darwinism as technology and markets evolve and disrupt. This isn’t new. But what is clear, executives are not prioritizing bold strategies and investments that save them from their “Kodak Moment,” that moment when consumer behaviors and values evolve beyond brand recognition. If you read about the state of retail today, you’ll see dramatic descriptors such as “apocalypse,” “the end…,” “dying,” you get the picture. While doom and gloom and disruption is inherent in every…
